William Matthews, born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on November 11, 1942, was educated at Yale University and the University of North Carolina. He was a professor of English and director of the writing program at the City University of New York.
Matthews' scope of interest was immense. From animals to his children, from music to sports and his poetry reflected this. It isn't easy to write poems about sports. Sports are often called poetic, and it is true. But because of this it is often difficult to capture the beauty, joy and pain of sports any better than they are presented on the field. Occasionally this happens though. Below are three poems by Matthews about sports, and maybe some of the best sports focused poetry ever.
In Memory of the Utah Stars
Each of them must have terrified
his parents by being so big, obsessive
and exact so young, already gone
and leaving, like a big tipper,
that huge changeling's body in his place.
The prince of bone spurs and bad knees.
The year I first saw them play
Malone was a high school freshman,
already too big for any bed,
14, a natural resource.
You have to learn not to
apologize, a form of vanity.
You flare up in the lane, exotic
anywhere else. You roll the ball
off fingers twice as long as your
girlfriend's. Great touch for a big man,
says some jerk. Now they're defunct
and Moses Malone, boy wonder at 19,
rises at 20 from the St. Louis bench,
his pet of a body grown sullen
as fast as it grew up.
Something in you remembers every
time the ball left your fingertips
wrong and nothing the ball
can do in the air will change that.
You watch it set, stupid moon,
the way you watch yourself
in a recurring dream.
You never lose your touch
or forget how taxed bodies
go at the same pace they owe,
how brutally well the universe
works to be beautiful,
how we metabolize loss
as fast as we have to.
from Rising and Falling © 1979 William Matthews. Online Source
Masterful
They say you can't think and hit at the same time,
but they're wrong: you think with your body, and the whole
wave of impact surges patiently through you
into your wrists, into the bat, and meets the ball
as if this exact and violent tryst had been a fevered
secret for a week. The wrists "break", as the batting
coaches like to say, but what they do is give away
their power, spend themselves, and the ball benefits.
When Ted Williams took - we should say "gave" -
batting practice, he'd stand in and chant to himself
"My name is Ted Fucking Ballgame and I'm the best
fucking hitter in baseball," and he was, jubilantly
grim, lining them out pitch after pitch, crouching
and uncoiling from the sweet ferocity of excellence.
from Search Party © 2004 William Matthews. Online Source
Foul Shots: A Clinic
for Paul Levitt
Be perpendicular to the basket,
toes avid for the line.
Already this description
is perilously abstract: the ball
and basket are round, the nailhead
centered in the centerplank
of the foul-circle is round,
and though the rumpled body
isn't round, it isn't
perpendicular. You have to draw
"an imaginary line," as the breezy
coaches say, "through your shoulders."
Here's how to cheat: remember
your collarbone. Now the instructions
grow spiritual -- deep breathing,
relax and concentrate both; aim
for the front of the rim but miss it
deliberately so the ball goes in.
Ignore this part of the clinic
and shoot 200 foul shots
every day. Teach yourself not to be
bored by any boring one of them. You have to love to do this, and chances
are you don't; you'd love to be good
at it but not by a love that drives
you to shoot 200 foul shots
every day, and the lovingly unlaunched
foul shots we're talking about now --
the clinic having served to bring us
together -- circle eccentrically
in a sky of stolid orbits
as unlike as you and I are
from the arcs those foul shots
leave behind when they go in.
from Rising and Falling © 1979 William Matthews. Online Source
And a little bonus... a poem centering around high school football in rural Ohio by James Wright:
Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry Ohio
In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.
All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.
Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.
From The Branch Will Not Break © 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963 James Wright. Online Source
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